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Brian Laban at Le Mans can barely contain his incredulity as Toyota falls at the last, handing the 84th 24 Hours to Porsche

There is absolutely nothing you can say that puts the last three minutes of Le Mans 2016 into any kind of perspective. We talk about twists in the tail, knowing that they do happen, while not necessarily truly believing that they will - but there was never a twist like this one.

With three minutes and a single lap between him and Toyota’s first, totally deserved, victory at Le Mans, Kazuki Nakajima slowed dramatically in the second half of what should have been his wind-down, savour-the-moment lap, then stopped completely right by the finish line – one lap too soon for the dream to come true and to turn it into a nightmare.

There’s a suggestion that backing off to stage a photo finish with its sister car may have thrown the otherwise metronomic Hybrid out of kilter. But whatever, Nakajima reported a total loss of power, and that he was trying to keep moving on hybrid energy alone, but it was never to be.

So the 2 Porsche of Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb takes Porsche’s 18th outright Le Mans win, a back-to-back win after 2015, and possibly the most unexpected win of them all. No, surely the most unexpected win of them all.

And Audi snatches a podium from nowhere, which maintains an unbroken run since their first appearance in 1999 – and which even Audi motorsport boss Dr Wolfgang Ullrich admits he would be hard pushed to take any real satisfaction in.

Then to rub salt into Toyota’s wound, the car that was about to win doesn’t even feature in the official results – because by the letter of the rules, it wasn’t running at the end.

Toyota motorsport boss Hugues de Chaunac is visibly distraught and tearful: “Sometimes we have a dream,” he says, “but this is so hard to accept. I just cannot believe it.” And the stunned silence across the circuit in the aftermath says he is absolutely right.

So Porsche win, Toyota has the very, very poor consolation of second place with the number 6 car of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Stéphane Sarrazin, while Sébastien Buemi, Anthony Davidson and Nakajima must surely be beyond any consolation.

For the whole race, there has rarely been more than a minute between first and second in every class; but really, there’s only one story for now – and almost irrespective of your allegiances, it’s a desperately sad one that we’ll surely talk about for years to come.